Hi Phil,
After some hiccups, I successfully installed the beta-3 Windows XP
distribution on two machines. I thought that the experience below
may be helpful to others on the Coda mailing list. I'm also
including some feedback on vcodacon, since you'd asked for that.
When I tried to install the new cygwin, the install hung about
half-way into the process. This was repeatable. After some rather
digging I figured out the following: if the machine already has an
old cygwin installed (e.g you ran the previous version of Coda),
the new install hangs. If you don't have an old cygwin around, the
install works fine. That's why your new machine gave no trouble.
The real problem is that there seem to be a bunch of files (e.g. the
venus.cache directory tree plus the LOG and DATA files for RVM) that
simply cannot be deleted even if you are a Windows Administrator.
You get "Access denied". Nothing I do (including rebooting) seems to
help. Finally, I just renamed C:\cygwin to C:\cygwin-DELETEME.
That left about 80MB of garbage around, but the install of the new
cygwin then worked like a charm. After that the Coda install works
beautifully and it has been running stably.
On the second machine, I saw that I already had a C:\cygwin-DELETEME.
So now I have a C:\cygwin-DELETEME2, and roughly 150MB of disk
garbage! I remembered that I ran into exactly this a year or so
ago for the last version of Windows Coda. I haven't yet figured
out how to get rid of these DELETEME trees. I thought Administrator
in Windows was like root in Unix. Obviously not quite the same!
Other than the above cygwin nuisance, the beta-3 Windows release
works great. vcodacon is a start, but could be improved in
a number of ways. Some suggestions:
1. The files appearing and then disappearing is annoying. I'd rather
have a scrollbar that I can use to move back in history, and
something that works roughly like codacon.
2. The reintegration light coming on is only slightly useful. Much
more useful would be a light that indicates that I have a non-zero
CML. Perhaps even two numbers like 15/784K to indicate 15 CML
records and 784KB container file volume? I realize that one could
have dirty state in multiple volumes. Not sure what the best way
to handle this is. Just add records together and volume together?
Or 3 numbers: <Nvols>/<totalrecs>/<totalbytes>
3. The H, G, R, D, C indicators don't do much for me. But percentage
file fetched is helpful; absolute numbers in addition would be
useful, so I know whether it is 50% of 1MB or 10MB.
I haven't had a chance to test BigFile and symlink
support yet. Soon....
Overall, it's great to have a much more robust Coda on Windows.
I have come to really rely on it, and feel handicapped without it.
Nice job!
-- Satya
